After a few days off recovering from PT4, a few of us went
to Gateway Airport (uh oh, my favourite….) to complete the upset recovery
module of the course. This was a part I was really excited about; I've always
wanted to have a play with an Extra300! I felt pretty confident going into it
having experienced aerobatics before with the cadets.
We completed the upset recovery training with an external
company called APS and spent the first morning in ground school, mostly
watching videos, studying a bit of PoF and learning about their ‘PUSH,ROLL,
POWER, STABILISE’ technique for unusual attitude recovery. There were 6 of us
in total on the course, two guys were from the American air force and were not with
the academy, the rest were members of my course. The lessons were presented by
a real life astronaut, which was so cool
In the afternoon we met with our instructors (they were all
ex-military fast jet pilots who did this for fun!) and went for the first
flight. It was amazing! Although we took off from Gateway, it felt very
familiar flying around the same desert and same practice area that we've been
used to this whole time. We just went a little bit (a lot) higher and had a bit
more power than the Archer gave us. The cockpit was very simplistic in the
front seat (the instructor is sat behind in tandem), I had only an artificial
horizon indicator and an airspeed indicator, as well as a control stick, not
yoke, and throttle. We couldn't take off or land (tail dragger and I'm not about to volunteer to take off and talk to Gateway tower....) but were given control after the instructor upset the aircraft and flew to and from the practice area to get a feel of it.
During the first lesson I got to have a nice feel of the
aircraft and do a few stall recoveries, the Extra stalls fantastically! You’ll
go nose high, flying along fine and then all of a sudden it’ll flip a wing and
you’ll be falling out of the sky with the ground above your head. It was so
cool. The Push, roll, power technique is supposedly applicable to all aircraft
and most unusual situations and it worked really well to solve the problem. The
moment you gave it a little push on the control stick it relieves the angle of
attack on the wings and breaks the stall. It was insane how well that worked;
the only think that kept popping into my mind to compare it to was that scene
in Avatar where Jake and his Banshee are falling, he tells it to “shut up and
fly straight” and it rights itself straight away, know the one? Same deal with
the Extra apparently, give it a tiny push and it’ll settle.
I've always prided myself on my iron stomach during flight
and loved every second of the lesson, we did a fair few stalls in different situation;
pulled some G’s and got some inversions in. Unfortunately not all members of
the group faired so well and did have to reach for the sick bag during their
flights.
At the end of the day we had to go home and complete an easy
test (I think we all got 100%) on what we’d learnt that day, which completes the
theoretical portion of the module, leaving just 2 flights left to complete.
Another early start brought us back to Gateway the next
morning and it was straight into the air for our final two lessons. It was an
amazing experience and I can see the practical use of upset training but mostly
it felt like a reward of all our hard work so far and gave us a chance to play
with an outstanding little aircraft. As my stomach had been fine the whole
time, my instructor agreed to show me some proper aerobatics at the end of the
final session. I’d always wanted to try
tumbling which I’d seen at air-shows before but he showed me a fair few and
joked with the ground staff that he was going to try and make me ‘black out’.
He did not succeed. We did +7G to -2.5G and I felt completely fine (And sort of
proud that I did the most out of all the boys).
Mission objectives:
- Stalling
- Usual attitude recovery
- Startle response – He asked me to update the QNH on my attitude indicator, as I reached forward he flipped the aircraft and let go, telling me to recover. The idea being that the recovery should be quick and become second nature as in real life you may not always get a warning e.g. wake turbulence.
- Stuck Primary controls – This was really interesting. It was seeing how you could control the aircraft if one of the three primary controls (aileron, elevator, rudder) was jammed. We tried all three out and I found the hardest to work without was the rudder.
At the end of the sessions we were given a certificate for
successful completion presented in a frame with a picture and poem, none other
than Cpt. John Magee’s ‘Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds….’ My dad’s
favourite poem! We also received a memory stick containing the go-pro footage of our entire flight's which is definitely for learning and refreshing purposes and not to be shared on Facebook to make friends jealous back home, ahem...
After that fun interlude, it’s now on to the Seminole and
the home stretch of our time in Arizona!
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